Vegan Spider

Time to give up the predator lifestyle?:

SCIENTISTS have discovered the world’s first known vegetarian spider.

Bagheera kiplingi, a South American species, lives almost exclusively on leaf buds and is thought to be the only spider of about 40,000 species to have rejected a carnivorous diet.

Instead it has developed a laidback lifestyle based on nutritious wild acacia plants — and has no need to spin a web to catch its prey.

The females have even dispensed with the time-honoured spider custom of eating their sexual partners immediately after mating.

“This is the first spider known to ‘hunt’ plants as a primary food source,” said Christopher Meehan of Villanova University, in Pennsylvania, who observed the creatures, about the size of a thumbnail, on a field trip in Mexico.

The vegetarian diet of B kiplingi appears to have prompted other changes. Since it no longer needs to go through the energy-sapping business of catching prey, it has diverted its web-spinning abilities to building family homes. Mothers use the nests to rear their young.